120 Days of Sock'em:

I am tidying my apartment - it's something that I've avoided properly for months but I've run out of places to put my clean laundry so it had to be done.

Because on every tour I end up buying new socks when I run out of clean ones or when all my bags get nicked I've accumulated over 120 pairs of socks. Including the unopened packets that I also brought back with me I reckon I don't need to wash my socks for nearly sox months.

For some reason, that impressed me. I was going to see how many I could fit on my feet at once but then I remembered I'm at home now, not on tour. (I still haven't completely let go of the idea...)

I've also acquired a big, fat, sox month long business visa for China. I'm leaving on November 13th. That should be interesting...

Hammer Horror.


I got back to New York after my last trip exhausted, as usual, but also glad of the extra time I spent in London and Paris.

It's a strange feature of touring / traveling that getting home is both a good and bad thing. I'd ached for my own bed (literally in my bunk on the bus-a bunk that had started to smell of rabbits, for reasons I could never fathom unless it was either me or Albert below, but we're both very clean--just like Paul's Grandad) but when I got back I found myself missing England more than I ever have.

My American friends have told me my accent is back and I know when I was in England I was slipping in my Coventry accent again; deliberately too--which is about like making yourself fat for a laugh.

(Coventry Accent 101: Say Water without pronouncing the T, same with Butter. Use the word Scratter to describe someone who doesn't pay their way and is always trying to cadge ciggies or drinks or anything. Affirm everything not with Yes or even Yeah but with "Arh." said with a dipping chinese-style third tone. Duck is pronounced with a nasal U sound and no C. Not that we use the word Duck-off there much. Call a bread roll a Batch. Replace the words really and extremely with the word Dead. Classy, innit?).


Anyway, back in New York I started watching some of the twenty DVDs I bought in HMV and Virgin. These are mostly old British films and largely a bunch of 1970's Vampire films made by Hammer Productions. They were all shot in England with parts of Suffolk, I think, made to look like Transylvania. They were all full of comely wenches and most had Christopher Lee in them as Dracula. Oliver Reed makes an appearance as the Werewolf (he was dead good-looking before the drink destroyed him) and Peter Cushing is the man I'd most like to have as my grandfather if I could have a third and Peter Ustinov wasn't available.


Ingrid Pitt - Vampire Hottie. Part of me still wants to date a Goth (and Goth was still cool in Coventry and Leeds long after the rest of the world had got into rave music. Amy Lee got married already, didn't she?).




Christopher Lee - the James Bond of Draculas.



It's strange how these cheesy, dated movies have stood up over time. I can still remember scenes I'd only seen once on a Friday night when I was about 12. They left an impression, that's for sure. To be fair, comely wenches and a single flash of boob (usually by the end of the second reel) coupled with dark and powerful undead super-antiheroes is a powerful aphrodisiac for a 12 year od boy.

It's funny to find a vivid sense of self in something from your childhood. The same can be said when I listen to The Jam, I can instantly be transported to being angry and eager and fifteen and crazed with a huge unsatisfied appetite for life. Not like the jaded old tosser I am now.... It's good to know that those feelings from back then don't go away, but something happens over time that makes them less accessible.

I also got copies of David Essex's movies That'll Be The Day and Stardust, both classic (if a little contrived) British Rock movies back when we were good at such things. Ringo was in That'll Be The Day (and Keith Moon makes a cameo!) and it was one of the first films me and my brother recorded and kept on video (along with Papillon and Billy Liar).

To a large degree these movies were--apart from hanging around at soundchecks when The Jam played Birmingham--my first introduction to the behind the scenes world of the music business (there were no VH1 Confessionals back then). I think it's still pretty accurate now. Well, everything except the bit about making dogs OD on Acid. I don't think anyone does that anymore these days.

Things to do in Paris When You're Dead.


After the tour I felt dead. I usually do. And despite being in one of the most fantastic cities in the world (and it is...) and being in very special company I still felt tour-drained.

However, I saw some very wonderful sights, some old, some new.

Place des Voges - I think this is my favourite Parisian park. It looks like the setting for a monet painting.



None more dead.

This is Serge Gainsbourg's grave. Last time I went it was raining and I was smoking gitanes. I left him a pack. This time I didn't have any fags for him. Definitely too much fucking perspective. (Note the respectful fan tributes - even the metro tickets left for Serge didn't litter the other graves nearby. Not like the abomination that is Jim Morrison's grave in Pere LaChaisse--where the scummy hippies scrawl their pompous bollocks over the nearby gravestones and sit and get pissed nearby. Because it's important to write your tired, tepid, stoner insights on unrelated gravestones. Because your unique insight and vanity means you don't have show any respect for the surrounding families. Fuckwits. Kill them. Kill them all.)



Ever get that feeling someone's walked over your grave?

How cool is this one? It looks like Gaudi designed it--and it's got my name on it.



I liked this one because it's got the world's most depressed statue on top. Whoever was buried here wanted to be sure someone would always be grieving.



And Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's dual grave. Fittingly minimal. Dead classy.




Montparnasse is my favourite Parisian cemetery. I think being an old git enabled me to enjoy it all the more. I'm starting to feel like I'm robbing time from one of them....

I got to visit the catacombs for the first time. They're an amazing labyrinth running for miles underneath the city. This location was originally a quarry but they moved the human remains buried at Les Halles during the plague years here when they developed Les Halles. Later, in a super-French style, someone decided the bones needed to be stacked stylishly. It's spooky and surreal and fantastic.










On my last afternoon I went to a gig. Because I love them so. Fortunately this one was in a park next to the Seine and in true French style what would be a throway field in the UK or USA was a design triumph with balloon rides in it, a cool railway bridge, a riverfront esplanade, several water features and fountains and two giant glasshouses open for exhibits (well, one was, but I'm not complaining). Got to love France. If you don't, you're probably dead. Trust me on this.

Balloon rides - I have a feeling there's some link to the Montgolfier Brothers here but I'm guessing (and too lazy to look it up).





People in glass houses....



Oldies but goodies....this never gets old. It's always breathtaking, especially when it's up close.




From underneath the base it seemed completely implausible that it was built when it was as it's so huge. It also looks like a giant weird spaceship. As places to go when you're hurting, Paris has to be one of the best...

Ghost Town:


I was born and bred in Coventry. For years - from the age of about 12 until just recently - I wanted to get as far away from it as I could. At the end of my last tour I went back to visit my mum and my brother and for the first time in ages found the place intriguing and illuminating. (It probably isn't for anyone else...)

Coventry once boasted a busy, overcrowded, medieval-designed but developing city before WWII. The city centre becamse so congested the council were trying to find ways to relieve the congestion. Then the Luftwaffe blitzed it during the war, and razed the city centre to the ground. From a bustling medieval city centre to a wasteland with a ruined Cathedral in no time at all.

Not wasting any time (and after the allies bombed Dresden in return--see Slaughterhouse 5, so it goes) the city was rebuilt quickly int he post war years around a new city centre design by architect Donald Gibson. His revolutionary idea was to remove all the cars and to pedestrianize the centre of town.

Sadly, this had the effect of making the town centre one of those good-on-paper ideas as it sanitised the city centre and made it bland and lacking in dynamics.

Then, in the 1970s the city got hit badly by the recession when all the car factories and heavy industry started to close. Double-whammy. Coventry changed from a place where my grandmother's generation would once talk about the city's character and craftsmen with pride to turn into the most violent city in Europe. There was nothing left.

This is where I grew up.

What I noticed on this trip is that compared to almost anywhere esle, and with the recent redevelopment, it's not such a bad place. It has a lot going for it. In fact, the main problem seemed to be the people. Many were aggressive and feral looking, almost all of them looked round-shouldered and beaten. When I first walked around the city centre on the recent bank holiday afternoon I was surprised by the sharp stares and skulking aggression I encountered before I realised that I may be a poncey git from New York now but I did grow up a spiteful little fucker, just like the little shits hanging around the precinct trying to menace the shoppers.


Once I got my game-face back on I had a hoot walking around Coventry. The city's improved a thousandfold since I lived there, there are cafes and restaurants and stores open at the weekend and it's not so bleak (but that might be because I don't live there). I felt sad for the people; there was a haunted look to many faces that went beyond the usual English dourness. I remember when I lived there that not only did I feel like I came from nowhere, there probably wasn't much point in trying to aspire to much outside. It's shit, innit, Cov? Women who'd look at home striding the streets of Manhattan pushed prams hunched over; kids who should be developing games companies or starting businesses skulked around the centre of the precinct. If everyone in Cov said it was brilliant for a year the city would go into turnaround, I'm sure.

Friends I've made since, from other regional cities didn't share this view. They might say Leeds is shit but it was never the end of the line for them. Or they'd brag about Sheffield like they were - gulp - proud of their hometown. All foreign feelings to me.

It's a shame that the song that captured the tone of the city in 1981 can still be relevant today. Back then there'd been a recession, now it seemed more like an attitude, or a nickname that's been allowed to stick. Give a dog a bad name....

Enough of my yacking. This is where I'm from.


I'm from Coundon (pronounced Cown-Dun). My mate Graham was in the Coundon Dogs, they rode around on 50cc scooters. I didn't have a scooter so I wasn't cool.




This lush lawny area is misleading. Until I was 10 it was waste ground that we'd ride our bikes over. In fact when they were laying new pipes (water,gas, etc) we used to roll them down the hill towards the traffic, sometimes with people in them. I went down a few times in a steel drum. And we used to roll old car tyres down the hill but they sometimes went into the oncoming traffic and we'd have to leg-it. Kids, eh?






This is the street I was born on. Everyone's got three cars now. Back when I were a lad there was at most one Ford Cortina per house.... Those are conker trees - we used to strip them every autumn, first with sticks and later with a nut tied to a bit of string you could lob up over the branch and then yank on to shake the conkers down. We made a right mess. We didn't care about playing conkers so much as getting them. It was a good place to be a kid. Plenty of fresh air and space.




These flats up the road from my mum's used to be considered a bit fancy. Roger the poncey, short-tempered hairdresser lived in one and he was divorced, which was considered quite outre back then. Now it seems they lack a certain class. I'm a great believer in being able to gauge a nation's pysche by its pornography and its advertising. This truck says it all. This shop used to sell women's clothes now it sells cheap booze.



The road into the countryside just past the White Lion pub at the top of my mum's street. When I was a kid we'd ride our bikes up here; when I was an adolescent we'd drink in the pub and try to go snogging with girls. I did a lot more bike riding than I did snogging. What can I say? I was a late bloomer.



People often jump off these blocks of flats when they can't handle living in them anymore.




Coventry's infamous ring road. It's a local road for local people. Not many outsiders get it right first time.



We used to run across the ring road but someone put up a big boring fence so now you have to walk over bridge. It's no fun. However, it gives a view of the city centre. The brown building is the Post Office. The IRA tried to blow it up in the 70's. Bleak, innit?




Part of the pedestrianized precinct. At night, when the shops shut and the people go home the city centre gets very empty and the only people you can see wandering around are packs of kids on their way somewhere or shitfaced on cheap/potent lager. That's when Cov' gets menacing. Doesn't look so bad here, does it? It's lairy at night. You don't make eye contact.



This used to be HMV where I came to read the music papers without buying them. A forerunner of Barnes and Noble in that respect. Now there are a lot of 99 Pence stores in town and this huge Pawnshop. That's a bit depressing.



The Burges. Where the chip shops, the bus stops and the taxi-ranks are. When the licensing laws in Britain meant everywhere had to close at 11PM (pubs) or 2AM (clubs) by about 11:30 and 2:30 this place was teeming with drunks trying to get chips and buses and taxis. I saw more fights here than I care to remember. You had to keep your eyes open. Anyone who wanted a ruck knew here was the place to start it. And all repressed English towns at closing time are full of angry people who want to fight. We'd walk down here to the Parson's Nose chip shop which was the best chippie in Cov. This photo was taken at 11:30AM on a Tuesday. The pub, the Coventry Cross, was doing a brisk business which made me sad that people didn't have anything better to do. It seemed indicative of the overwhelming feeling of the city.



The Parson's Nose and Mr Porky's. Two late-night institutions. Yes the sign does say Faggots, Peas and Chips All In. No, I'm not going to tell you what that means except to say that it was the primo-after pub meal if you could afford it. I rarely could so I'd usually get Saveloy and Chips. Typing this is making my mouth water.

The woman who ran the Parson's Nose was infamously rude to people--especially girls. There was always someone crying outside of here and often another row brewing.




Mr Porky's - he sold pork batches with stuffing. (Batch is Coventry for bread roll or bun. But it's a batch, right?). Never let it be said we didn't have any choice.



You'd eat your chips on the walk home as you'd never have enough money for a cab (well, townies might, if they had apprenticeships or something).


The station, looking south towards London. That misty strech of track always seemed like the portal to another world. I rarely went to London. It was like Narnia to me as a teen. And when I finally escaped and moved there, the world really did open up. But this view reminds me of being abitious and clueless.




Good. Now I've got that out of my system....